Psychoanalytic Pure War: Interactions with the Post-Apocalyptic

Unconscious
Borg, Mark B.

Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Volume

8, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 57-67 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/psy.2003.0004

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/psy/summary/v008/8.1borg.html

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 Psychoanalytic Pure War:
Interactions with the Post-Apocalyptic Unconscious1
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
P aul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer’s concept of “pure
war” refers to the potential of a culture to destroy
itself completely (12).2 We as psychoanalysts can—and
increasingly must—explore the impact of this concept
on our practice, and on the growing number of pa-
tients who live with the inability to repress or dissoci-
ate their experience and awareness of the pure war con-
dition. The realization of a patient’s worst fears in
actual catastrophic events has always been a profound
enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, how-
ever, catastrophic events not only threaten friends,
family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of
endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, televi-
sion, and Internet.3 Such continual reminders of death
and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the an-
alyst treating patients who live with an ever-threaten-
ing sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of
our cultural veneer?
At the end of the First World War, the first “total
war,” Walter Benjamin observed that “nothing [after
the war] remained unchanged but the clouds, and be-
neath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive tor-
rents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human
body”(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about
our contemporary situation, “The recourse to atomic
weapons seems to prove that horror...can rage ab-
solutely” (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging
this same fragility and uncontainability, the French
politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the con-
text of World War I that “war is too serious to be con-
fined to the military” (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15).
Virilio and Lotringer gave the name “pure war” to
the psychological condition that results when people
know that they live in a world where the possibility for
absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As
Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological
capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the exis-
JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2003
copyright © 2003 by The Ohio State University
tence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread
characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief
systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological sur-
vival requires that a way be found (at least uncon-
sciously) to escape inevitable destruction—it requires a
way out—but this enforces an irresolvable paradox, be-
cause the definition of pure war culture is that there is
no escape. Once people believe in the external possibil-
ity—at least those people whose defenses cannot han-
dle the weight of the dread that pure war imposes—
pure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual
state of preparation for absolute destruction and for
personal, social, and cultural death.
The tragedy at the World Trade Center in New
York City has given us a bitter but important opportu-
nity to study the effects of the pure war condition on
individuals. It allows us to look at how this all-encom-
passing state appears in psychoanalytic treatment and
to observe its influence through the analysis of trans-
ference/countertransference dynamics. The pure war
condition has been brought grimly to consciousness.
In this paper, I will explore how it manifests itself in
society, in character, and most specifically in the psy-
choanalytic treatment of one patient whose dynamics
highlight significant aspects of the pure war state.
How does treatment happen when, at some level,
we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our
individual differences, our visions of the psychoana-
lytic endeavor arise out of the social defense of the cul-
ture within which we live and work (I have referred to
this as “community character,” cf. Borg 350). And
whatever our individual differences, in a pure war situ-
ation the primary task is simply to sustain the dream of
psychic survival. The case of Joyce, who saw the first
explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down
Fifth Avenue in a bus after her session with me, exem-
plifies this task.
58
THE PURE WARRIOR
The philosophy (or practice) of “pure warriors,” that
is, of people who are preoccupied with the pure war
condition of their society, is based on the perpetual
failure within them of the dissociation and repression
that allow others to function in a situation that is oth-
erwise completely overwhelming. Joyce was one of
those who lived on the border of life and death; she
could not escape awareness of that dread dichotomy
that most of us are at great pains to dissociate. She
manifested the state of perpetual preparation that is
the hallmark of pure war culture and of the insuffi-
ciently defended pure warrior, and also a constant
awareness of the nearness of death in all its various
forms. She understood quite well, for instance, that
when people are institutionalized (as she had been on
numerous occasions), “society is defining them as so-
cially dead, [and that at that point] the essential task to
be carried out is to help inmates to make their transi-
tion from social death to physical death” (Miller and
Gwynne 74). Against this backdrop, Joyce sought psy-
choanalysis as a “new world,” the place where she
would break free from the deathly institutionalized as-
pects of her self, and begin her life anew. Her search for
a “new world” included the possibility of a world that
was not a pure war world—a prelapsarian Eden.
Virilio and Lotringer state that “war exists in its
preparation” (53). And Sun Tsu, who wrote over 2400
years ago and yet is often considered the originator of
modern warfare, said in The Art of War, “Preparation
everywhere means lack everywhere” (44). This means
that when the members of a culture must be on guard
on all fronts, the resources of that culture are necessar-
ily scattered and taxed. The more defenses are induced
and enacted, the more psychologically impoverished a
culture (or a person) will be. In war-torn nations, re-
sources like food, clothing, and materials for shelter
may be scarce in the general population because they
are shunted off to the military. Similarly, the hoarding
of psychological resources and the constant alert status
of the defense system are outcomes of existence in a
pure war culture. We can see this scattering and
scarcity of resources occurring already in the United
States as billions of dollars are shunted from social ser-
vices to war efforts and homeland security.
In pure war cultures—that is, in cultures that
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
enact a perpetual preparation for war—the notion of
peace is itself a defensive fantasy, although to survive
psychically we distract ourselves from such frightening
stimuli as widespread terrorist activities and other
events that demonstrate our pure war status. Pure war
obliterates the distinction between soldier and citizen.
We have all been drafted. According to Virilio and
Lotringer, “All of us are already civilian soldiers, with-
out knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no
longer have the means of recognizing it” (42).
Some of us do, though, and Joyce was one of
those. And even the rest of us occasionally catch a
glimpse of the pure war condition in the dark light of
such acute traumatic events as aircraft hijackings, race
riots, “ethnic cleansings,” the World Trade Center Dis-
aster, and suicide bombings. As precise psychoanalytic
interpretations illuminate well-entrenched personal
psychological defenses, so acute traumas and disasters
may highlight the massive insecurities that lie beneath
the surface of an otherwise well-protected cultural
exterior.
ORIGINS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC
STUDY OF PURE WAR
A precursor to the notion of pure war can be seen in a
comment made by Freud in the aftermath of the First
World War:
The primitive fear of death is still strong within us
and always ready to come to the surface on any
provocation. Most likely, our fear still implies the
old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of
his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his
new life with him. (242)
That is, through the constant preparation for war de-
manded by the pure war condition and the enactments
that such preparation entails, we “share” our lives with
the dead.
Winnicott’s description of “fear of breakdown” is a
related vision, addressing fear of a previous, rather than
a future, event (103). In his view, haunting of the liv-
ing by the dead relates to past, current, and ongoing
conditions of internalized pure war, rather than to ac-
tual or certain future events:
It must be asked here: why does the patient go on
Psychoanalytic Pure War
being worried by this that belongs to the past? The
answer must be that the original experience of
primitive agony cannot get into the past tense un-
less the ego can first gather it into its own present
and into omnipotent control now. (105)
In pure war, omnipotence is shattered. Winnicott
speaks to a timelessness in the unconscious, and indeed
pure war represents the ultimate end point of the ego’s
once seemingly infinite timeline. As in Winnicott’s no-
tion of fear of breakdown, we cannot ward off pure war
without anticipating it, and we cannot anticipate it
without its being already there, forming our horizon.
In a similar vein, Sullivan delineated the interper-
sonal security operations that people call upon to inat-
tend to or dissociate from the internal conditions (that
is, anxiety) inherent in unbearable states of preparation
(Interpersonal Theory 110). Both selective inattention
and dissociation are security operations that circum-
vent awareness of anxiety. Without them, as psychoan-
alysts know, the recollected dreaded primitive experi-
ences appear to be returning in approaching future
events. This entrapping feedback loop, which is the
plight of the anxious individual, can be seen on a larger
scale in the pure war culture. All we need for the pure
war condition to exist is the belief in apocalyptic possi-
bility—and our global culture and its technology of
communication bolster this belief day by day, indeed
minute by minute.
From their individual viewpoints, therefore,
Freud, Winnicott, and Sullivan each described facets of
the pure war condition. They outlined the processes by
which it may be translated into patterns of interaction
with the environment (individuals, institutions, etc.),
and they examined the repetition/enactment of these
processes in the transference. A person’s attitude to-
ward his or her environment (of which one representa-
tion is the analyst) is inevitably made up of transferen-
tial appraisals, which are formed initially and
maintained afterward in cultural as well as familial
contexts. Of course, to the degree that pure war is an
internal condition, reaction to it may be observed in all
forms of psychological defense: sublimation, dissocia-
tion, repression, splitting, obsessive-compulsive behav-
iors, and so on. Each one of these processes addresses
the underlying terror of the pure war perception by
59
communicating the message, “See? Everything’s really
OK after all.”
Patients like Joyce end up in our offices when such
reassurance becomes impossible. The specters with
whom we share our (internal) lives perpetually
threaten to retaliate, the harbingers of pure war. As we
share our lives with them, they share their deaths with
us, pulling away the covers under which we keep our
own internalized and dissociated personal visions of
total annihilation.
Some of us manage to catch glimpses of the pure
war reality and hold onto them long enough to report
them before the familiar processes of defense kick in.
G. Brock Chisholm was a psychiatrist who looked the
reality of pure war in the eye after the dropping of the
atom bomb on Hiroshima. Chisholm organized a con-
ference titled “The Tensions That Cause Wars,” and he
wrote:
As mundane distance shriveled into insignificance
in the eddies of radioactive matter which swept
space around the earth, so also did the swathings
of immaterial fictions and habitual evasions with
which everyone had been methodically en-
wrapped. The peoples of the world, wherever lan-
guage reaches, caught a glimpse of Reality, felt
with whatever terror a moment of insight into
alike the miniscule and the magnificent Human
Being. (85)
Sullivan responded to this commentary by asking sar-
donically, “Do we want nearly everyone to die in order
that the human race may begin all over? It is seemly
that we, momentarily honorable among the builders of
the future, shall further by irresponsibility a schizo-
phrenic dream of death and rebirth” (“Remobilization”
244). Like Joyce, Sullivan was traversing the life/death
tightrope—dreaming of “new beginnings”—in the
context of Chisholm’s grisly glimpse of “Reality.” But
notwithstanding his characteristic sarcasm, even Sulli-
van in his focus on rebirth may have been denying the
pure war reality that Chisholm let himself see.
PURE WAR AND CHARACTER
I understand character as the repetitive interpersonal
behaviors or interactive patterns that typify a person’s
sense of self. These adaptive/defensive interactive pat-
60
terns form a personality structure stable enough to
pursue security and the satisfaction of needs even in
the face of anxiety (e.g., A. Cooper 721; Sullivan, In-
terpersonal Theory esp. 42–43, 267–268). They may re-
quire reinforcement, however, when access to security
and satisfaction is fundamentally threatened. Given re-
lationships (between parent and child, for example), or
specific communities (as in prejudices, taboos, laws,
sanctioned rules of conduct, or cultural norms) may
pose such threats. Our contemporary global commu-
nity is constantly demonstrating for us threats against
societies and peoples, documenting the unrelenting
environment of threat in which we live. The devasta-
tion of life in Israel by the recent suicide bombings
there has given us a rare glimpse of what we could ex-
pect in an ongoing “war on terror,” however defen-
sively we might call such a war “Enduring Freedom.”
The ways that the pure war mode manifests itself
in societies can be understood through the concept of
community character: like an individual, communities
or cultures (especially in the context of chronic
trauma) can develop characteristic ways of interacting
that work to maintain security and decrease awareness
of overwhelming levels of anxiety within the culture
(Borg 347).4 These repetitive ways of interacting often
manifest in rules, regulations, taboos, and stereotypes.
This implies that character formation based on adjust-
ment to a pathological society can produce psy-
chopathology by two related mechanisms. Ours is a so-
ciety in which some people suffer from an inability to
adapt while others suffer from the compromises they
have made in the service of adaptation. Examples of
the former are easily found in psychiatric hospitals; the
symptomatic compromise of the latter are visible, for
instance, in the degeneration of corporate ethics, a
growing tolerance of cruelty, and the tendency to tar-
get and scapegoat criminals without accounting for the
criminogenic environments that sustain crime as a re-
action to intolerable living conditions. The ultimate
pathological compromise is the acceptance of these
and similar behaviors as the norm. Perhaps this pro-
vides a context for a statement made by French cultural
theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: that in
such a society “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a bet-
ter model [for living] than a neurotic lying on the ana-
lyst’s couch” (Anti-Oedipus 2).
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
Schizophrenia is a process that breaks with what
Deleuze and Guattari call “molar formations” (Anti-
Oedipus 128): modes of thought that have been cap-
tured by the rules and regulations sanctioned by con-
sensus in a population—the familial, community, and
societal standards and expectations, the “Thou Shalts”
and “Thou Shalt Nots” of a culture. Once a person has
experienced a break, he or she becomes in Deleuze and
Guattari’s terms “molecular” (213) or “deterritorial-
ized,”5 and is then an outlier to those standards (in
their terms, a “nomad” [Thousand Plateaus 54–55]).
Or, in the terms of their translator and student, Brian
Massumi, “a [molar] structure is defined by what es-
capes it—[supermolecularized individuals, schizophren-
ics, for example]” (Massumi 57).
Accordingly, Massumi says: “Schizophrenia is a
breakaway into the unstable equilibrium of continuing
self-invention” (92) (as opposed to invention by soci-
ety and its prescriptions). For the schizophrenic (“out
for a walk”) model to work, this supermolecular ap-
proach to living has to exist outside the power dynam-
ics of the pure war system (the system that maintains
the capacity of some to inflict annihilation on others).
This is exactly why such a painful state as schizophre-
nia can at times appear to be a seductive alternative to
the constraints of conventional socialization. It can
seem as if the only alternative to a break (-down) of
this or some other kind is conformity and subscription
to the pure war character. In his introduction to Anti-
Oedipus, Foucault describes this conformity as “the fas-
cism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behav-
ior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire
the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (xiii).
A looming question remains, particularly for ana-
lysts doing clinical work: how to use these concepts to
help their patients deal with the problems that bring
them into treatment. Deleuze and Guattari suggest
that societies and their members may be characterized
on a continuum that stretches between the absolute
limit-points of fascism-paranoia and anarchy-schizo-
phrenia. At the fascist-paranoid pole are the indoctri-
nating, colonizing maneuvers that lead to social con-
trol and conformity, while the anarchy-schizophrenia
pole stretches the limits of life’s possibilities and per-
ceives the world as an infinitely open system (Thou-
sand Plateaus 10–11). In their view, schizophrenia is
Psychoanalytic Pure War
not a metaphor. They view schizophrenics as lone no-
mads whose thinking processes are capable of challeng-
ing a fascist system. While this can be a seductive per-
spective, it is also highly romanticized, and few
clinicians who are intimately familiar with the ravages
of schizophrenia could literally advocate for becoming
a schizophrenic, especially in a fascist society. I am,
therefore, presenting an unresolved tension between
the view of schizophrenia as clinical entity (and a
metaphor) and the sort of experiment in thinking seen
in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.
In this vein, Lynne Layton (esp. Ch. 1 and 5) has
presented a helpful critique of the ways in which many
postmodern theorists (including Deleuze and Guattari
3) celebrate and romanticize processes such as identity
fluidity and fragmentation while disavowing the possi-
ble traumatic underpinnings (often related to physical
and/or sexual abuse), relational etiologies, and reper-
cussions of such processes. The question that emerges
is whether or not analysts inevitably push their patients
into social conformity in their (sometimes desperate)
efforts to “cure.” Or, as Layton wonders (personal
communication), can analysts strive for something
else, like helping patients find less self-destructive ways
to resist conformity, and thereby avoid the pathologies
of both rebellion against (psychosis and paranoia) and
adaptation to (dysthymia, i.e., resignation) the pure
war world? I continue to work with the notion that
this is possible, while realizing that, perhaps, these
questions are never finally answerable.
ANALYSIS IN PURE WAR
Joyce is a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish New Yorker who
“snuck” her way into my office, as she put it. When she
contacted the psychoanalytic clinic where I work, she
represented herself as a psychiatrist seeking a referral
for an analyst who accepted Medicare. Some months
into her treatment, she explained to me that she had an
“infamous history,” including many therapists and
psychiatric hospitalizations, and she felt certain that no
one who knew about it would give her an “adequate”
referral. She had long been labeled schizoaffective, and
she had recently endured an extremely painful separa-
tion from her previous therapist of two years. She told
me that she needed psychological treatment as a condi-
tion of remaining housed at her community residence.
61
Joyce claimed numerous physical (diabetes, epilepsy,
cardiac dysrhythmias) as well as emotional (depression,
loneliness, rage) problems, but she said that she was
more interested in making use of the capacities that she
still had than in focusing endlessly on those that she
lacked.
In her initial evaluation, Joyce described her life in
institutions. She felt that she had to fight to make any
kind of decisions about her daily life (when to go to
bed, who would be her roommate, etc.). This made her
very angry, but at the same time she was almost totally
dependent upon the very institutions (Medicare, her
community residence, etc.) that she felt were taking
away her freedom, especially when they imposed upon
her frequent and involuntary admissions to local psy-
chiatric hospitals. The anti-psychiatrist David Cooper
has said that “those admitted into a psychiatric hospital
are admitted not so much because they are sick, as be-
cause they are protesting in a more or less adequate
way against the social order” (48–49).
This was how Joyce felt. She lived with intensely
conflicted feelings of defiant dependency about the
system within which she felt, and was, constrained. As
these feelings were enacted in her analysis, we began to
recognize a social system based on a “warehousing ide-
ology”—that is, a system for “storing” those that do
not fit into the “molar formation.” This system served
solely “to prolong physical life” (Miller and Gwynne
71)—at least that was the only benefit that accrued to
Joyce. She perceived correctly that reimbursement pro-
cedures (SSDI, Medicare, Medicaid) made her admis-
sions profitable to her keepers, and that the result was a
self-serving institutional system that was apathetic (if
not actively hostile) to her actual needs. Joyce was also
acutely aware that upon entry into an institution she
entered the realm of the socially rejected. Miller and
Gwynne have addressed this experience:
By crossing the boundary into the institution they
[those institutionalized] have demonstrated that
they lack any role that is socially valued in the out-
side world…They are defined as social dropouts,
parasitical upon the wider society…The harsh re-
ality, therefore, is that by the very fact of commit-
ting them to institutions, society is in effect defin-
ing them as socially dead. (73–74)
62
Thus, schizophrenia may be, in part, the lot of vet-
erans of the hard-won battle of acknowledging, disso-
ciating from, accepting, and rebelling against the pure
war condition.
Psychological defense generally does a fairly decent
job of maintaining a separation between our current
state of being alive and our future state of being dead;
this separation allows us to function. However, when
an analyst steps outside of this consensually valid disso-
ciation to interact with a patient who has done the
same, the awareness of pure war erupts into the con-
sciousness of both. The analytic engagement coalesces
around the reality that we are likely to remain in a state
of pure war for the duration of our lives, and so we are
challenged to grapple with our own anxieties about de-
terioration, annihilation, and death.
Organizational theorists posit that social systems
can provide useful (also not so useful) defenses against
anxiety (Jaques 478; Menzies 95). Most people belong
to many social systems, but some, who, like Joyce, are
condemned to existence within institutions, belong to
few. In cases such as hers, the analytic relationship be-
comes the representative of these missing social sys-
tems. For Joyce, the issue of maintaining a relationship
with any system upon which she feels dependent was
complicated, as the social systems in her life, far from
reinforcing her defenses, have clearly served to exacer-
bate her anxiety. We therefore had to resist the tempta-
tion to make me, the analyst, a “leader” who erodes the
ego functioning of his patient by identifying himself
with an ill-functioning system (like a psychiatric hospi-
tal), already perceived by her as incapable of contain-
ing her terrifying experience. When we managed to do
so, we were able to work toward sustaining awareness
of the extremely uncomfortable reality that results
when institutional structures cannot deal with ex-
tremely anxiety-provoking (i.e., pure war) existence.
ATTACK AND CONFINEMENT
Pure war dynamics played out in many subtle ways be-
tween Joyce and me through the first year of her four-
times-weekly psychoanalytic treatment. But they came
into the treatment relationship full force after the Sep-
tember 11 terrorist attack on New York City, where I
am in practice. Although Joyce had been psychiatri-
cally hospitalized numerous times before she became
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
my patient, it was not until the day of the World Trade
Center attack that she was hospitalized during her
analysis with me. On September 11, Joyce had at-
tended an early morning analytic session and then
caught a bus to go to an appointment with the social
security administration. Going downtown on Fifth Av-
enue, she saw from the bus window the explosion as
the first plane hit the World Trade Center. She told me
that she watched quietly while others on the bus
screamed out in horror. But when she got to her ap-
pointment she too began screaming, and was promptly
transported to a nearby psychiatric hospital.
Joyce had begun her analysis a year earlier with the
statement that “I feel as if I have been dumped into the
mental health system as a schizophrenic, and that there
is no return.” She had an inability to repress that left
her with the flotsam and jetsam of thoughts and affects
that result when there are massive failures of defensive
functioning; if she thought it or felt it, odds were she
was acting on it. A major question in the first year was
whether analysis would be able to contain the affect
and content that flooded her, and this question became
more pressing after September 11.
Joyce called my answering service from the hospi-
tal in a terrified fantasy that I had been killed at the
World Trade Center. Even after I told her that I was
unharmed, she continued calling my voice mail dozens
of time each day for several days, maintaining the fan-
tasy that I was endangering myself through volunteer
work, which, she imagined, was taking place amidst
the debris. Joyce’s consistent problems around bound-
aries were another manifestation of her projective ten-
dencies. For instance, she would leave innumerable
“emergency” messages on my voice-mail, often claim-
ing that her sole intention was to “save our relation-
ship.” The combination of her flooding paranoid
processes and her poor boundary maintenance gave
her a terrible potential for pure war perception—that
is, for the awareness of the flimsy lines that separate
fantasy from reality, inside from outside, murderer
from murdered, and, most especially, present from fu-
ture. The future, in this case, was infected by her
awareness (profoundly realized on September 11) that
absolute destruction is possible.
It seemed to me sometimes that Joyce existed to
challenge (if not to sustain an ongoing hostile attack
Psychoanalytic Pure War
upon) the social order, as it had been imparted to and
imposed upon her. She challenged this order in her ses-
sions in many ways, attacking the professionals whom
she’d “hired” to treat her, for example, with a facile
combination of criticism, profanity, and flatulence. We
talked about the fact that it often seemed as if she had
challenged the social order so long and so hard that she
had “forgotten the rules,” and so was infinitely per-
plexed when the system fought back. She was obsessed
by sexual, aggressive, and rebellious impulses that cov-
ered the entire span of psychosexual development.
Joyce consistently made clear after September 11
her acute awareness of the struggle that she felt within
herself “between life and death.” In some ways this
struggle was literally true; she did have severe physical
problems. Joyce had diabetes; her mother had died of
this disease and had lost both of her legs to it in an am-
putation shortly before she died, a falling apart that
resonated deeply in Joyce. But there was a symbolic
struggle as well. Both of her parents had been well
known and respected physicians, and Joyce felt that
her mother in particular quite literally had a power
over life and death, over coherence and chaos, that
could be shared or withdrawn at will. Joyce’s mother
had died when Joyce was seventeen, and the world fell
apart for her. Her father died a month later, having lost
his own power source, and Joyce’s siblings (one of
whom is her twin) then turned upon her, “attacking
and destroying” her (by sending her to her first psychi-
atric hospital) after that. They also ensured that Joyce
would never have access to her inheritance.
Joyce’s vision of her mother’s power, and the acute-
ness and catastrophic results of her loss, led Joyce to ex-
tremely complicated relationships with power/author-
ity figures. The police and fire fighters, for example,
were heroes for their bravery on September 11 and rep-
resented to her potential sources of “salvation.” But
they were also the people who constantly “fucked” her
(by getting her hospitalized) through their inhospitable
responses to the 911 calls she makes perpetually when
she feels anxious. When her needs for salvation are not
met, Joyce feels abused and powerless. She had come to
believe that people with status use their power to abuse
her, and that she possessed neither the tools nor the
status to prevent the abuse. To her way of thinking, she
received abuse from the very medical and social sys-
63
tems that sustained her; she would call for help, and
these “emergency” calls would often result in the next
hospitalization. This is all the more poignant in view of
her feeling that in their deaths her parents had been
failed by the medical system that they had served.
Realistically Joyce did not have anyone to protect
her, and she consistently tried to put me into the
treacherous (i.e., idealized) transferential position of
protector. To protect requires authority, however, and
as Shea and Wilson note, “Every act of authority is, in
fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical territory
of another” (793). She envied everyone who had the
foundation that she felt she lacked (and actually did),
and her envy was so intense that her life had become a
process of tearing other people apart. She did this in
her mind (especially with regard to my other patients,
whom she refers to as schvartzas and faggots), and
often in reality as well: she had a track record of report-
ing her physicians to state boards and developing com-
plicated litigation scenarios that she sent to prospective
lawyers, and once to the White House. It was our ex-
ploration of these attack patterns that revealed the first
glimmerings of her pure war condition.
As we began to outline Joyce’s preoccupation with
destroying and being destroyed, she made it clear that
her capacity to focus was being derailed by a growing
obsessive awareness of her vagina. Joyce told me that
she had engaged in compulsive masturbation since her
teens. But it was only after the World Trade Center dis-
aster that she began to reveal her fascination with her
vagina, her masturbatory practices, and her associated
fantasies. Upon her return from the hospital a week
after September 11, she began to discuss the details of
her “hours and hours” of daily masturbation. Joyce had
never had any sexual contact because she was terrified of
being penetrated by a violent and uncontrollable penis
or being infected by diseased vaginas. Her fantasies fre-
quently included packs of men wielding knife-penises
who are coming to rape her. She also believed that the
vaginas of other women carried diseases that would in-
fect and destroy her. However, her fantasies about
women also conjured up more nurturing scenarios that
were made safe, in part, by their focus on non-contact
parallel masturbation rather than direct physical con-
tact. She began her discussion of the masturbation and
her related fantasy life by presenting a dream:
64
I was masturbating on the driveway of my family
home and became embarrassed when I noticed
that there was water flowing underneath my feet
from the garage. As I noticed this, you went riding
by on a bicycle waving and smiling though not,
apparently, noticing that I was beating off. But
still, in the dream I knew that you knew what was
going on.
When she described the emotions related to her
dream, Joyce said that she felt ashamed, as somehow it
had become clear in our interaction that I knew now,
“for sure,” that she was “actually psychotic.” Up to that
point she had pretended not to know that I knew
about her difficulties; if that were the case, we would
not have to discuss them. Upon exploration, it seemed
that the dream was revealing Joyce’s feelings about the
processes of her own body, both her extreme fascina-
tion with them and her sense of alienation from them,
as from the “wetness” of her vagina, the water flowing
from the garage. She revealed that her shame (in the
dream) was not that I had “caught [her] beating off,”
but that I was in a position to witness how it was that
she “actually worked.”
Joyce said that the only reason that she was now
willing to address this issue was because she had re-
cently experienced an irritating intruder into her fan-
tasy life—her analyst. Each time she tried to engage in
one of her fantasies she would sense a foreign presence
and then would notice that I was sitting somewhere
just on the periphery of her fantasy in my chair, silently
taking notes.
As we talked, we developed an understanding of
Joyce existing as a shell. Within the shell were con-
tained body parts, all of which had essential, though
separate and fragmented relationships with the outside
world (that is, with me). She also saw herself as relating
to others primarily if she could perceive them as frag-
mented also, similar to herself. Her fantasy of me being
killed at the World Trade Center focused on the per-
ception that I had been torn to pieces, “caught in the
rubble.” Why she had created this particular fantasy
scenario became a key question for us upon her return
from her one-week hospitalization.
On the one hand, she was clearly not aware of the
degree of rage that informed her fear that I was dead
(“in the rubble”). Projection of rage of this sort is, of
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
course, at the core of the paranoid process. This rage
was motivated by her intolerable feelings of growing
dependence on me. After all, the last time she allowed
herself to become dependent on a clinician (her previ-
ous therapist) she ended up being abandoned, finding
herself in the rubble. By putting me in the rubble, she
had transformed me into fragmented body parts, too.
So, on the other hand, killing me, tearing me apart in
the rubble was also a constructive psychic act, one that
allowed a perceived commonality from which to begin
relating her experiences of living in such a shattered,
dissected condition. On numerous occasions I asked
Joyce why she needed to break me apart and she was
able over time to share her feelings of envy (that, in her
fantasy, I give more to my other patients, of my being
in a committed partnership, of my being an accom-
plished professional), fear of abandonment, and, she
said, “because I love you.”
Tearing me apart let her accept an increased level of
intimacy between us—another dissected, fragmented
person could be safely negotiated, she felt, whereas a
whole person could not, would not tolerate her. The
extent to which this dissection process was projected
into others in her world became increasingly accessible
in treatment. Her obsession with her vagina, and the
sense of fragmentation that this sustained, had been an
unintended entry point into her experience of and de-
fense against the pure war condition in her (our) world.
FALL APART
Joyce revealed that she had long since stopped believ-
ing in herself as an organized entity. Deleuze and
Guattari have said that “we live in a world of partial
objects, bricks that have been shattered to pieces”
(Anti-Oedipus 42). They describe the psyche (and soci-
ety) as a system of flows and interruptions—they call
them break/flows—analogous to a circuit board that al-
lows or disallows the flow of electricity. Desire (or li-
bido) is an example of a simple but pertinent
break/flow pattern: its expression is a flow, its (social)
prohibition a break. Prohibition may be challenged by
the flow of desire (even if unconscious and enacted) in
ways that either thwart or reinforce the initial prohibi-
tion, and so on. Prohibitions, in fact, can foster a retro-
spective perspective on desire: “That’s what I’m not al-
lowed to have? That must mean it’s what I want(ed).”6
Joyce seemed in her experience of the pure war
Psychoanalytic Pure War
condition to have been effectively “shattered to pieces.”
As she obsessively described her masturbatory prac-
tices, I began to perceive her as a system of break/flows:
call it countertransference. In this fantasy (which she
confirmed by her own description), the break/flow
process begins with the flow, the desire underlying her
masturbation that is represented by her wetness, the
flow of water in the dream. It is broken by painful im-
ages of unrequited love and wished-for, prohibited
lovers (including most specifically her previous thera-
pist). These images then transform again and flow into
erotic social images of these lovers (hybrid versions
made up of body images appropriated from porno-
graphic materials with various familiar people’s heads
attached). The new flow is broken again by prohibition
(i.e., her shame about using porn), until her frantic
work at re-arousal erases the prohibitions and allows
the flow of desire once more.
Joyce could allow no identifiable “I” in her experi-
ence, no self that could be targeted in the (current,
past, and future) attacks whose perpetual anticipation
is her life. To be a series of disconnected processes and
body parts, to transcend the integrity of fixed selfhood
allowed her to feel, at some level, that there was no “I”
to destroy and therefore she was “safe”—“See? Every-
thing’s OK after all.”
Of course, any form of attachment to a whole sub-
ject/object was profoundly threatening to the experi-
enced incoherence that was so necessary to her sense of
security. To counteract her increasing, and often eroti-
cally-charged attachment to me she had to continue to
break herself apart. As her sense of attachment in treat-
ment increased after September 11, her need to break
her analyst apart increased as well. The fact that she
broke me apart in her fantasy of me in the rubble actu-
ally and ironically increased the felt intimacy of the an-
alytic relationship, intensified her attachment, and
brought a distant but sometimes more consistent sense
of “I” into her awareness.
CHRONIC DISASTER AND CERTAIN FATE
Falling apart is the “certain fate” of the pure war world,
and the punk band Mission of Burma asks a telling
question: “Can I count on you if I fall apart?...That’s
how I escaped my certain fate”[emphasis mine]. Their
question was Joyce’s question, and their solution was
hers also. Her mother’s body had fallen apart, initiating
65
a sequence that (in her mind) destroyed her father, her
family, and ultimately herself. Falling apart was a fam-
ily pattern, and she reenacted it in most all of her en-
deavors, including the transference. It appeared in her
experience to be a social pattern, too, and in fact her
psychological process of falling apart was both a de-
fense against and a reluctant acceptance of the pure
war state in which she lived. Joyce knew about pure
war: the things and people that had represented the
world for Joyce had been annihilated. Like the rest of
us, Joyce cannot completely escape her “certain fate” –
death. But to be able to “count on” the process of her
analysis became a possibility.
Joyce is highly committed to the defenses around
her conflicted desires and needs for intimacy and de-
pendency—as committed as the rest of us are to our
defenses against the perception of imminent death.
And she uses them in a similar way—to keep herself
from awareness of her own destruction—and so she re-
sists any analysis of them that might increase her
awareness of the conflict.
Trying to figure out what was actually happening
between us was always tricky. Was she being brought
back together (as an “I”), or was I being broken apart?
Who was more resistant to the authority/indoctrina-
tion/razing of the other at any given time? As part of
her analytic contribution, she shared her shattered
state, and, as part of mine, I fervently imparted my
conscious sense of coherent existence. Neither of those
two defensive states could really sustain any kind of
valid status as truth; both positions seemed to be more
like inhabited roles than fixed positions. Joyce’s mas-
turbation continued unabated. Sometimes we both ex-
perienced my interpretations as a violent attempt to
draw her in to a more understandable existence, cor-
ralling her for the purposes of branding, social confor-
mity. She retreated into the spaces of her schizophrenic
part-object escapes from the pure war condition, while
I scrambled for comfort into supervision, into the safe
and sturdy mommy-daddy-me triangle upon which
psychoanalysis was built. Even so, Joyce’s decompensa-
tions wormed their way into me, and it was not often
clear who was branding whom.
I wish I could wrap this up neatly—patient gets
better and analyst puts together a highly coherent the-
oretical conceptualization of the treatment to be pre-
sented at the Summer Meeting of the American Psy-
66
chological Association. But really Joyce and I live in a
chronic flirtation with disaster, never coming fully to-
gether, never breaking completely apart. When our re-
lationship teeters in the direction of imposed analytic
authority, we are (perhaps as a necessary defense) dri-
ven apart; when we are working from a sense of collab-
oration and equality, we come back together—more
break/flows. When I feel myself in pieces, I find myself
crawling away from the desert-like places our interac-
tions reveal; when I experience myself as a total system,
I have to search for the lost innards of the shell who lies
on my couch. I get nervous at the possibility that if we
can’t find hers she might steal away with mine, and so
the cycle continues.
Sometimes pure war enters into our conscious
awareness as the transference pull of Joyce’s dissection
of me brings me too close, brings us together. At other
times, she allows herself to depend on me and is trans-
ported through time and space, back to a time where,
perhaps, the mommy-daddy-me configuration granted
her more coherence than it does now. Though some-
times this state exists between us for minutes at a time,
her resistance to coherence generally wins out.
Nonetheless, we have found our way to one piece of re-
liable mutuality: we both know that pure war exists—
in Joyce, in the city surrounding us, and sometimes,
fleetingly, in me.
Indeed, for pure war to exist in our conscious
awareness all that Joyce and I have to do (and we do
this quite frequently) is look out my window at the
clearly visible Empire State Building. During the days
and weeks following September 11, many of us in New
York (a microcosm of the U.S. and perhaps, in some
ways, of the world) would turn our gazes toward it, ex-
pecting it to be “next.” Joyce and I do that all the time,
waiting for it to be attacked and shattered like the
World Trade Center, and our sense of ourselves along
with it. In the imagining that we now share, pure war
is happening.
I hear the clock ticking away the seconds of a re-
cent session (tick-tock-tick-tock). We aren’t looking,
but we both know what lurks outside the window of
my seventh story office window: pure war. Just as we
are coming apart, becoming overwhelmed by the mag-
nitude (tick-tock-tick) of the events in our surround-
ings (tock), everything (tick) stops.
Mark B. Borg, Jr.
Is the world still standing? Are we still alive? I sup-
pose that, much like Schrödinger’s cat, who is shut into
a box that contains poison and, until the experimenter
opens the box, is both and neither alive and/or dead, it
is and it isn’t; we are and we are not. At least until one
of us looks out to see. At forty-four minutes and
counting I begin to move my head to peer out the win-
dow, and, as she does once in a while, Joyce follows my
lead.
NOTES
1I would like to thank Jennifer McCarroll, Eve Golden, and
Sandra Buechler. This essay could not have been written without
them.
2Virilio and Lotringer stress that the state of pure war does
not depend on the presence of active hostilities. It is the existence
of a possibility—the capacity for total destruction (53).
3A striking example of this can be observed in Bill Keller’s re-
cent article, “Nuclear Nightmares,” in the May 26, 2002 edition of
The New York Times Magazine.
4The concept of community character resembles Erich
Fromm’s concept of social character (305). However, Fromm’s ideas
focused mainly on descriptions of capitalist societies. The concept
of community character, in contrast, seeks to highlight how core
psychoanalytic understandings of the individual can also be used to
understand the workings of a community or culture whatever its
political or economic structure. For example, I have previously
written on the depressive community character of an impoverished
community in South Central Los Angeles. Vamik Volkan, in his
study of the fundamental need for political and social enemies and
allies, also hypothesized a system of group defense (94). This sys-
tem-level defense is developed by large groups in the service of pro-
tecting its (psychic and actual) identity and borders.
5Territorialization is a term derived from Lacan’s analysis of
the process by which parental caregiving maps the infant’s eroge-
nous zones, charging specific organs and corresponding objects
with energy and value. Territorialization thus programs the desire
to valorize certain organs and objects at the expense of others, and
at the expense of what Freud called “polymorphous perversity”: the
free-flowing form of desire that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to
schizophrenia. Deterritorialization is the process of freeing desire
from established organs, objects, and uses (Holland 19).
6This resonates with Foucault’s thoughts in The History of
Sexuality, i.e., that prohibitions are productive; they produce desire
(81–83, 86).
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